Coming back from the future: web design
As a computer science undergrad, one of my co-op terms was in web development for the faculty of arts. Initially hired to do some systems and web programming, I eventually stumbled onto web design. We used Macromedia Studio for designing sites for various departments in the heyday before CSS became as popular as it is today. Some of the more fashionable departments had used CSS but mainly for style rather than for structure. So more often than not, the core team of HTML-nuts used unclosed <p> tags, tables within tables, and lots of transparent spacers. And we loved it because we could trust that the majority of the browsers supported things like tables and images-- we didn't have to worry about shifting layouts across different browsers. Near the end of my term, some designers started using CSS and layers (in the Dreamweaver idiom). But I didn't really get it.
Then came graduate school.
A few years after emerging from the engine room of computer science, I found myself in need of a quick buck in a country with nary a software development firm in sight. So I fall back on my experience and skills as a web developer. Now, the first thing I do is open Dreamweaver, create a table 800 pixels wide and centre it. I whip up a set of vertical and horizontal spacers, add a few more tables for the header, nav bar, the content and the footer, and a couple of colspans later, I have the beginnings of a page. I was quite smug about it, actually. I had only vaguely heard about new (and continued) developments of the web while stuck in the stacks: XHTML, DOCTYPEs, blogs, Web 2.0, folksonomies, community-oriented, LAMP and dynamic, database-driven sites, .NET, Ruby on Rails and AJAX--but I figured the basics of displaying a web page were still there, right? GET and POST were still there, right? I had used many of the new technologies while surfing this or that site, but I only suspected that it was more of the same.
It *was* more of the same, and then some. The W3C had made huge strides in doing some standardization, and the proliferation of CSS/XHTML-based designs was a testament to that. This was led in large part by an adage that programmers always risk ignoring: separate logic from data. Or, separating structure from content.
A chief economist of IBM once told me that Microsoft is one of the only corporations they consider major competitors and visionaries of the tech landscape. Google, Yahoo and eBay were "flash[es] in the pan" he said. I get his point. But talented and determined people finally have tools and they can create.
